“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, he believes to be true.”
-Demosthenes

Desire, similar to fear can cloud our rational thinking and is equally as dangerous. It’s important that when we’re making decisions and evaluating that we try to understand our own biases. When we want something so badly to be true, we can consciously and subconsciously seek out information that impacts our thinking to support the outcome we desire.

Most people spend their time and energy seeking out materials that validate and confirm what they already believe.

In business, we want to be successful so badly that we make reckless decisions based on poor facts. In investing we fall into speculative behaviors because we want to be wealthy. We justify a partner’s poor behavior because we deeply desire love. We like drinking alcohol, so we search out the scientific studies that say drinking wine or alcohol is good for us. The list could go on, but this is a dangerous line of thinking and behavior.

A couple things I am trying to do more of:
1. Ask myself, are my desires are clouding my thoughts and affecting my decision making. Am I thinking rationally based on fact or hope because I want something so badly?
2. Surrounding myself with a couple people who will speak candidly with me about my thought processes. This doesn’t mean I listen to everything they say, but it’s important for me to have a sounding board that will question my thought processes.

We need to be careful how we choose our confidants and their motivations. Many people seek advice from people that work for them or who are reliant on them for money, promotions, or even social advancement. This can create an echo chamber of people amplifying what we already believe. Essentially supporting our biases, whether rational or not.

It is healthy to challenge our ideas and thinking. Rational thinking is very difficult because we’re humans with real emotions, fears, and desires. But if we’re at least aware that our desires can affect our thought process, perhaps we set up some processes to make better decisions.

“Caring is taking the time, indifference is making excuses.”

A basketball coach I used to work with, Tom Desotell, used to always say this to our staff and players. He was adamant that if something was truly important to a person, it had to be prioritized and given the time and energy that it deserved.

How often does this happen in our lives? We have good intentions for the things that are important to us. I want to be a good parent, but I have to work. I want to improve my health, but I don’t have the time. This happens to all of us.

We have to make sure our most important priorities line up with where we spend our time and energy. Otherwise we will look back on our lives with enormous regret wondering how we missed so much of what matters most.

One of the challenges that we all face is that the world is chaotic and increasing complex to the point where our minds simply cannot process or make sense of all the information and stimulation that is coming our way. So our brains take care of it for us. We unknowingly use of strategies to organize the world around us.

Why Do We Do This? Our Brains are naturally lazy and pre-conditioned to conserve energy so they’re constantly looking for short-cuts. These short-cuts are helpful as well, it saves us from having to completely de-code all the information in the world from scratch.

What are some examples? (These are not the technical terms)
1. Pattern Recognition- Our brains naturally seek out information that are already familiar with. The challenge is we might miss important information because we’re not familiar with it, so our brain does not actively look for it.

2. Associations- We look for information that resembles previous information that we’ve seen. This isn’t that different that pattern recognition, but the brain takes the liberty of making assumptions with this little bit of information. Again helpful in certain circumstances, if sharp things are dangerous, I can make the assumption that knife is dangerous without actually needing to be cut myself. The problem is it can also lead us to make assumptions that just aren’t true. We may presume to know or understand things about other people based on quick judgments.

3. Grouping- our brains organize items, people, and information into groups to help us make sense of the world. Example: instead of having millions of different individuals with their own needs, we group based on a shared fact pattern, sort of like their brain’s filing system. A great time and energy saver. Sometimes its helpful, other times it leaves gaps or misunderstandings.

There are countless more and the point of sharing this is that our brain can miraculous things but it can also go on autopilot very quickly and easily. With our team at Exclusivia, we try to make sure we are aware of the fact that our brain will leave us prone to gaps. But hopefully because we’re aware of our brain’s hardwiring, we can be a bit more proactive in questioning it collectively. We try to ask simple but helpful questions to the group such as:
“What are we missing?”
“Why are we making this assumption?”

While this does not mean that we never miss anything or make any mistakes, we believe that being aware of some of the brain’s shortcomings has been helpful in collectively serving Exclusivia’s mission as well as living our own best lives.

Many times we will look people who are achieving success with admiration because from the outside they seem to make it look easy. As if they have a code of some sort that the rest of the world doesn’t have. The very best performers and leaders are obsessed with a commitment to the process. They fully understand that success is just a by-product to consistently focusing on doing the right things everyday.

Take a look at one of the greatest coaches of all time: John Wooden basketball coach from UCLA. He won 10 NCAA Championships in 11 years and is widely considered the greatest coach of all time. Yet if you analyze the philosophies you’ll observe there were no secrets, no shortcuts, and most importantly an obsessive focus and commitment to teaching the fundamentals everyday. Coach Wooden’s pyramid of excellence serves as great teaching tool and testament to his commitment to focus on the process. He always understood that if he and the players focused on doing the principles in the pyramid, his team would have success as a by-product.

You can apply this logic to everything in your personal and professional life. The best business executives, coaches, athletes, writers, investors, parents, friends, and leaders all have an incredible commitment to processes and principles. Success isn’t fast and there will be difficulties or setbacks; however, when you remain fully committed to high quality processes success will eventually come as a product of doing the right things.

What at first seems hard will over time start to seem a bit easier and easier, through consistent practice. Through repeated engagement, the effects of the daily activities compound to lead to the development of something special. This is one of the many reasons I recommend to do the daily activities and see what happens to your mental and physical health. You also build momentum, and that is a major force behind all great accomplishments. Of course, in order to build momentum, one has to overcome some level of resistance.
One does not always know the path to success, but it is often just behind whatever you resist. So find the resistance and smile at it as it is the force that does not want you to change. Once this force is overcome, the rest will be easier.

The keyboard is all well and good for articulating certain thoughts and ideas, but relying on typed text could be shortchanging your ability to generate novel insights. Here are a few reasons why doodling and other forms of visual thinking can boost professional performance and personal wellbeing:

IDEA CAPTURE
Ideas are often fleeting. Doodling helps us concretize our initial thoughts quickly and intuitively, thereby lessening the risk of our forgetting them as a result of the brain’s limited capacity for retaining short-term memories.

IDEA DEVELOPMENT
Few ideas are born fully hatched. Doodling lets you start at as small a scale as you want and then build up as your thoughts develop and your information expands.

BRAIN AND BODY CONDITIONING
Doodling by hand can not only advance a project, it can also bolster your own mental and physical state. Numerous studies indicate that recurring motions of the hand energize regions of the brain associated with creativity and long-term neurological health.

Image credit: Writing chair. Artisan unknown. American. Early 19th century. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

WHY DO IT
Viewing works of art and craft can stimulate creativity by encouraging openness to new experiences and learning; promoting risk-taking; increasing pleasure, advancing health, and reducing stress; facilitating mind-wandering; and inducing saccadic eye movement, which strengthens neural connections between the brain hemispheres.

DESIGN TIP: MIX IT UP
Creative thinking eschews fixity of mind. Consider mixing up your pieces—and your thoughts—by occasionally swapping them out, acquiring electronic frames or monitors to project assorted images or video, using easily changed mounting systems, such as magnetics, or simply moving items around. You might be surprised how differently you’ll look at a work of art depending on its freshness, location, and adjacency to other pieces.

CONTENT TIP: KEEP IT POSITIVE
Strive for positive affect. Mood arousal is a powerful engine of creativity. Be sure you derive happiness from what you collect. Work that raises stress levels or causes emotional distress could have an unintentionally negative effect on out-of-the-box thinking.

Image credit: Photography studio of Nicholas Yarsley. Gloucestershire, United Kingdom. Architecture, interior design, and photography by Nicholas Yarsley.

You’ve probably heard before that time is your most valuable resource. It’s finite and how you use it shapes your life, so the logic makes sense on the surface. This type of belief can spur action. It will give you the illusion that you cannot waste time without being productive every second of the day. However the more we’ve explored this topic with the Exclusivia team, we’ve come to the conclusion that that this isn’t quite right.

Time is not your most valuable asset. Intentional, focused time is your most precious resource.

Not all time is created Equal. Neuroscience tells us that it is not physically possible to give 100% maximum concentration every second of everyday. Attempting to do so, will eventually lead to exhaustion, in-balance in life, and diminishing returns.
A good analogy to this is physical exercise. When you train your body there is a point where too much exercise is no longer beneficial and actually starts to become detrimental to the body. The muscles, joints, and bones start breakdown and become at increased risk for injury. Intense fatigue and overtraining will lead to diminishing results for athletes. The same is true of your mind.

The highest level performers understand that not all time is created equal. So they do short “sprints”. This is prioritizing the very most important tasks of their day and giving them the ultimate focus, concentration, and attention that they can. No multi-tasking, no all day work trying to fill every second of the day. Just short, very focused time.

This mental framework provide enormous productivity and liberation. Do not feel guilty about turning the mind off and relaxing in between “sprints”. Give yourself permission to enjoy time with family, friends, and pursuing hobbies. It will actually improve your efficiency.

“Dearest Fear:

Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting—and, may I say, you are superb at your job. So by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must. But I will also be doing my job on this road trip, which is to work hard and stay focused. And Creativity will be doing its job, which is to remain stimulating and inspiring. There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still—your suggestions will never be followed. You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote. You’re not allowed to touch the road maps; you’re not allowed to suggest detours; you’re not allowed to fiddle with the temperature. Dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio. But above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”

Excerpt from Big Magic – Creative Living Beyond Fear]

Just leaving this excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic, would have been enough value to anyone who reads it. It’s incredible how we let our own fears intervene and control our lives. It’s easy to let fear “give directions or take the wheel” especially when difficult times or decisions come. Fear’s main purpose is to keep us alive, but if we’re not careful fear can prevent us from actually living.

If you are not committed to continual constructive discomfort from
leading-edge learning and application, nothing can help you.

If you are committed to continual constructive discomfort from
leading-edge learning and application, nothing can stop you.

We are living in a comfort crisis. In so many ways, we are more comfortable in our lives and work than at any time in history. The hardwired brain loves the comfort-seeking and comfort-clutching attitudes and behaviors that fill up the lives of so many people. In most settings, the people around us, and all our competitors, are in his trap, too, so we hardly notice how much it is eroding our potential effectiveness.

There are evolutionary mind, heart, and body benefits of extending the edges of your comfort zones in how you live, lead, and learn. One of the most important choices and commitments you can make like the world’s best leaders and teams make every day is to embrace more of the discomfort of learning at the leading edge of record-setting possibilities and applying that learning. This uncomfortable approach to leadership and living can significantly improve your health and happiness and deepen and expand your understanding of what it means to be most human and alive. Here are several ways you can embrace more of the right discomfort:

Notice. Start observing how often your conscious and subconscious minds default toward mental and physical comfort. Doing what you usually do, in the way you usually do it. Sitting instead of standing. Sinking into your chair. Spacing out. Going on autopilot. Resisting new learning. Delaying fitness actions. “Polishing the past” instead of testing new ways forward. And so on. Make notes—what you discover and focus on drives growth!

Raise the resistance. As you know, muscles only grow from increased resistance and variation in angles of exercise. As leaders, to streamline and align how you think, move, plan, create, and set records, you must add more resistance. Seek new learning that stretches your mind and senses. Challenge yourself to learn at least three or four valuable new things each day and put them into practice. (Are you noticing how your brain is balking at even these relatively simple suggestions?) Carry a notepad and pen so that new and potentially challenging ideas don’t just slip away. Remember the research we mentioned on how “a pen in hand” making notes crushes the mediocre effectiveness of just thinking or typing at a keyboard.

Stand and move more than before. For over a decade, I have worked almost exclusively at a standup desk; using headphones and earphones; only sitting down at a conference table or desk to change things up, participate in a video conference, etc. I am sure you have seen the research on how deadly sitting (for too long) can be. Focus on this simple adjustment!

Left on autopilot, your brain will coax you into slumping and slouching, which cuts off up to a third of the blood and oxygen to your brain and senses. Along with standing and moving more, add some balanced load or resistance, such as wearing a light adjustable backpack with some weight in it. Another idea: Part of each day at my standing desk, when I am not having personal meetings with clients, I wear a GoRuck Weighted Training Vest: https://www.goruck.com/products/training-weight-vest; with 10 or 20 pound plates. Scientific studies now show that humans were designed to ruck, or carry weight, and this builds both brain and body fitness in ways almost no one embraces today—except Tier 1 leaders and teams.

Challenge your edges and step back more often to get ahead.” Test adding a mind-clearing, do-nothing “step backs,” of just a minute or two, every hour or two across the day to recharge your mind and body. When you can, step outside, into nature—which can multiply the positive benefits that almost everyone misses. Recent studies show this is vital for sustaining peak performance.
According to a summary of research on what is called the brain’s “default mode network,” here’s what I taught: “When we stop responding to external stimuli for just a few moments, our brains don’t do nothing, they do the most important things, helping us to have the resilience, fortitude, insight, and vision to guide us toward our most successful and satisfying lives.”

Our greatest strengths are born not from talent but from our willingness to embrace discomfort and challenge on the path to what is truly possible in life and work.

The immediate benefits and long-term return on these small, specific upgrades will pay off for you and your team many times over.